Retail therapy

Sigmund Freud argued that people are governed by irrational, unconscious urges over a century ago. And in America in the 1930s another Viennese psychologist named Ernest Dichter spun this insight into a million-dollar business. His genius was in seeing the opportunity that irrational buying offered for smart selling. Dichter understood that every product has an image, even a “soul”, and is bought not merely for the purpose it serves but for the values it seems to embody. Our possessions are extensions of our own personalities, which serve as a “kind of mirror which reflects our own image”. Dichter’s message to advertisers was: figure out the personality of a product, and you will understand how to market it. Recent developments in neuroscience have inspired fresh questions about instincts and desires, unconscious prophesies and gut decisions. New information about human cognition has led the hard sciences back to the same sort of concerns that preoccupied psychoanalysts in Vienna a century ago.what was once the domain of Freud and Dichter has been appropriated by researchers in lab coats. Yet many of the theories sound remarkably similar—albeit with rather less emphasis on Oedipal urges and castration anxieties. “Recent published findings in neuroscience indicate it is emotion, and not reason, that drives our purchasing decisions,” reported Mobile Marketer magazine earlier this year. The quantitative trends that tossed Dichter aside have ultimately led back to his ideas. Read more at The Economist

How Luther went viral

The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed. That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform. The important factor was not the printing press itself (which had been around since the 1450s), but the wider system of media sharing along social networks—what is called “social media” today. Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message. Read the story at The Economist.

Information’s Deadly Price

The Committee to Protect Journalists issued its annual report on journalists killed in the line of duty and the numbers were grim. At least 43 journalists were killed around the world in direct relation to their work in 2011, with the seven deaths in Pakistan marking the heaviest losses in a single nation. Libya and Iraq, each with five fatalities, and Mexico, with three deaths, also ranked high worldwide for journalism-related fatalities. The global tally is consistent with the toll recorded in 2010, when 44 journalists died in connection with their work.

Read more at the New York Times

2011: At least 106 journalists killed

According to the figures registered by the Press Emblem Campaign, at least 106 journalists have been killed during the current year in 39 countries -- around 2 every week. The revolutions of the Arab Spring resulted in at least 20 journalists killed. Compared with 2010, the figure on 18th December shows no improvement - while 2009 was a record year, largely owing to the massacre of 32 journalists in the Philippines in one day, for a total of 122 killed. 91 journalists were killed in 2008 and 115 in 2007. In addition to the killing of more than 20 journalists during the Arab Spring, more than 100 others were attacked, intimidated, arrested and wounded in countries of the region, including Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen.
Mexico, Pakistan most dangerous countries -- For the second year in a row, Mexico has been the most dangerous country for media work with 12 journalists killed since January. Iraq is tied for third place with Libya with 7 journalists killed.

Read more here

Newspapers have five years to live

The San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and just about every newspaper in America will be gone in five years, if you believe an upcoming report from USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism.

“Is America at a Digital Turning Point?” predicts only four major American newspapers are likely to survive, and none of those are west of Washington D.C. If you live outside the Washington to New York corridor, you will be reliant upon online sites, social networks, broadcasters and weekly newspapers for your news and information.

More at SFBay: http://sfbay.ca/2011/12/20/newspapers-have-five-years-to-live/#ixzz1h5b7G34i